Don’t export Whitehall to the regions – to succeed, mayors must be allowed to innovate
(Christopher Furlong/Associated Press/Alamy)
4 min read
The days of Whitehall resisting devolution are over.
When Bev Craig, Greater Manchester’s new mayor, sits down with ministers and senior mandarins in No 10 North, the conversation will be a world away from the ones her predecessor had. In tone, in ambition, in who holds the cards. Of everything to come out of Burnham’s first 100 days, that shift may prove the most lasting legacy.
If the first 100 days were about grand designs, the next 100 will be about the nuts and bolts. The decisions made in the coming weeks and months will shape how Britain is governed for a generation.
Inevitably, the debate will centre on powers, funding and accountability. We’ll get some answers next week, with the publication of the ‘fiscal devolution roadmap’ at the Budget and the ‘Rewiring the State Delivery Plan' hot on its heels.
Getting these mechanics right will be vital. But what if the thing that will ultimately decide devolution’s success isn’t about the mechanics at all?
My fear is this: between the complexity of standing up six new strategic authorities while deepening devolution in fourteen others – and the mayors’ eagerness to make the most of this opportunity for progress – far too little thought is going into how these institutions should actually function and behave.
I’m not even really talking about capacity here – vital though that is. I’m talking about the character and culture of these institutions, how they do things, and the conditions inside them that will determine whether they thrive.
The danger is a vacuum opens up where the hard thinking on institutional design and culture should be. And in the rush to fill it, the system defaults back to what it knows best: the same old Whitehall playbook.
This isn’t a hypothetical concern. From the start, mayoral authorities have been largely shaped by the centre. Look under the bonnet and you’ll find Whitehall engineering: the same kinds of statutory duties and regulation; the same rigid, cumbersome ways of buying, managing, staffing and funding.
Whitehall knows this playbook is broken. That’s why the cabinet secretary is leading a fundamental review of the Civil Service. In this next phase of devolution, as mayoralties evolve from being grant distributors playing by Whitehall’s rules to autonomous strategic leaders in their own right, they mustn't inherit a set of practices and tools Whitehall itself is discarding.
Why does this matter? For a start, look at how the state traditionally runs services: form-heavy, tech-shy, flummoxed by complexity, happier treating symptoms than causes, and built around its own organisational chart rather than people’s lives.
Then there’s Whitehall’s love of turf wars. Burnham has in the past complained that “too much time is wasted with departmental silos battling each other and battling the Treasury rather than getting things done.” It’s a story we heard again and again when speaking to political advisers and civil servants for the Future Governance Forum’s ‘Transforming Downing Street‘ report last year. Let that same culture take root across 20 regional fiefdoms of different political stripes, each squaring up to its neighbours and to Whitehall, and the whole machine might seize up.
And that’s before we get to Whitehall’s cultural inheritance: a deeply ingrained fear of failure, a permission culture that smothers initiative at birth, officials too afraid to tell the truth, and bureaucratic working styles where papers and meetings are the only way.
I could go on. But the lesson is this: without a concerted effort, there is a risk we create a family of combined authorities (CAs, in the jargon) born hundreds of miles from Whitehall, but carrying its DNA – programmed to default to a traditional toolkit for running services and running an institution. All that change, only to change very little. Plus CAs change, plus c’est la même chose.
Burnham and the mayors must reject this copy-and-paste statecraft. Instead, they must devolve and innovate: breaking out of old silos and ways of doing things, breathing a new culture into these institutions, building their capacity to think and act strategically, and making them laboratories for a smarter, more human way of governing. Using devolution to build responsive, joined-up public services. Empowering staff with the technologies, tools and freedom to get things done. Helping centre and local work together and play to their strengths.
There’s no point ‘rewiring the state’ only to return to business as usual. Andy Burnham faces a choice: the status quo, relocated or a new generation of local institutions built around people and place. One thing’s for certain: the answers won’t be found in SW1.
Bruno Dent is a researcher at the Future Governance Forum
